So Much Happier Blog
The Upside of Down
“The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.”
This week I read an article about how middle children are becoming less common because family sizes are smaller than they were a generation ago. These "middles" may tend to become more self-reliant and diplomatic, according to some in this position, because they get less attention and have to gain skills through self-reliance and a bit more adversity than their eldest and youngest siblings. In adulthood, they may cherish these traits, but in childhood it may have been hard to seem less important, less visible. This got me thinking about the ways in which we can all learn to appreciate the skills we have picked up, by necessity, out of the ashes of our own annoying or upsetting circumstances.
Even someone whose life looks easy to others has been through trying times. No one goes through life unscathed. So even without knowing you, I know that you've been challenged, buffeted, and forced to adapt somewhat in your life. If you think about the times in your life that have been hardest, you may still wish things could have been otherwise and experience some pain in the recollection. That's very normal. But if you want to stop being defined by these unfortunate events, sometime when you can find a quiet, calm moment, try allowing yourself to perceive beyond the plot points of your story. What did you learn about yourself as a result of living through this experience? What decisions about the future did you make that have helped you to become more of your truest self? Where did you become stronger and more able to spot and avoid trouble in the future? What skills did you decide to cultivate so that you could meet similar challenges more competently in the future? And how has all this learning served you since then? How will it continue to serve you and others with whom you can share your wisdom?
When painful things happen, it's easy to get stuck in wishing they hadn't, because pain obviously feels bad. We may have experienced real loss, which can be extremely vivid, and it can distract us from the appreciation of what we still have that's good. Note that I'm not arguing here against the process of grieving, but it need not exist in a vacuum—when it does, that's when we can really spiral downward in unhealthy ways. If we never get around to acknowledging the hard-won lessons of growth we've achieved through hardship, our self-confidence will lag behind our level of competence. We won't actually acknowledge or get to enjoy the greatness we already have at our fingertips. We will let opportunities where we could have excelled pass us by. We will feel uninspired and unfulfilled because unused aptitudes weigh on us; we know we could be wielding them in the service of our deepest purpose and feeling a glorious satisfaction in it. Who do you think is more of a blessing, someone who shuffles around demoralized and drained, or someone who has the confidence to own their skills and use their powers for good? Who has more fun?
You don't have to love that bad things have happened to you, but I do recommend that you purposefully celebrate all the growth you've attained, whatever the circumstances that gave rise to to it. This is a far more productive place to focus than on past disappointments. By all means, Tap on the aftermath of those adverse experiences to release old pain, because sometimes the weight of them prevents you from effectively doing much else—you know if you've been reading these blogs for while that I'm the last person who's going to tell you to just "suck it up" and ignore your emotional reality! But also, train your mind to appreciate the best in yourself and the world around you. This is a powerful commitment that will help you boost your self-confidence and skyrocket your motivation to make progress in all the areas where you most want to win.
Leveraging Joy
“Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.”
We all have things we’re really great at and enjoy doing. We also have things we hate doing and struggle at—and yet sometimes doing these things is necessary. It certainly makes sense to work at being functional in numerous important areas of your life, such as finance, organization, planning and time management, social skills, negotiation, communication skills, etc., but some things will always be more fun for you than others. I suggest that you’ll likely be able to be far more productive if you can spend more time working on the fun (for you) tasks. You’ll feel more energized, hopeful, and creative in the course of doing that work and afterward. Conversely, when you spend time slogging through the tasks that are particularly difficult and dreary for you, you’ll feel more tired by the effort, more oppressed by the work, and your self-esteem is likely to take a hit.
The Gallup organization has done some fantastic work on this concept; they’ve conducted thousands of interviews with people in corporate jobs asking about what their greatest strengths are in the workplace. They published a series of books about what they learned, including the current research on the amazing leaps in success people are often able to make when they are allowed to focus on their strengths rather than trying to remediate weaknesses. I found their conclusions to be fascinating and quite common sense, actually, but unfortunately most cultures around the world, as well as businesses, function in just the opposite way from the recommended models. Gallup developed their own unique system of classifying the strengths they uncovered in all of these interviews, and if you’d like to take the talent assessment survey they developed and see the items where you rank highly, you can do that here. I found doing so very useful, and discussing the results with my partner most helpful as well—we each learned about the other’s strengths, priorities and viewpoints in surprising ways. Note that because the interviews were done in corporate office settings, there are plenty of strength areas that you won’t find represented here that might have been uncovered in other settings (such as those requiring more physical or creative work) but the ones enumerated here are still applicable to other kinds of work as well.
One of the greatest secrets to productivity, according to this work, lies in getting help on your most dreaded tasks from others with complementary skills while you intentionally focus on what you’re talented at doing. I find this concept to be very freeing: You mean I DON’T have to become an expert on every technological device in my house? (I loathe the endless minutiae of electronic things, but I hit the jackpot in that my partner is totally comfortable at figuring that stuff out. And it never takes him that long to do it, whereas it’s a demoralizing, time-consuming struggle for me. I can do it. I just hate it.)
Ok, time for an exercise. If you’ve never done this before, I suggest spending some time brainstorming about the tasks in life that you most enjoy doing, or at least find easy to accomplish. Are you at ease with people such that it’s easy-breezy for you to meet and talk to new people or make phone calls for various purposes? Are you a whiz with numbers? Maybe you’re great at estimating distances and other tasks that require skill in spatial relations. Are you handy? Unusually strong physically? Are you good at organizing social get-togethers? Do you enjoy writing? Reading? Are you musical? Like doing dishes? Try to think of every little kind of task that you look forward to in some way, even if only a little. It’s a good idea to think back over different times in your life to mine these abilities fully. Keep a list of items that you can keep adding to when you think of them and let it grow over time. This will become useful later.
Then, make a list of the things you don’t like doing. This should be pretty easy, since pain points are hard to miss. Most of us can rattle off our pet peeves at the drop of a hat. On the other hand, there may be some minor things you’ve never thought to add to the list because it seems self-indulgent to think about farming those out. Start allowing yourself to notice any little thing that is a downer in the course of your week. While you may not be able to completely solve all of these, you never know! Might as well make a wish list and see where it takes you.
Next, no matter what you do for a living, spend some time thinking about how you could do more of these tasks you like and cooperate with others to get some of the ones you hate doing done for you in return. This is such a simple thing, and yet most of us were encouraged to be “adult,” self-sufficient, and force ourselves to do everything alone—or sweep under the rug in shame the fact that we can’t or won’t do certain things. Turn out, that’s inefficient and unnecessary, not to mention demoralizing. I guarantee that someone you know would love to trade efforts with you on something you’d be happy to offer, and this is a fast and often free way to boost your satisfaction and results in life. You’ll feel good about helping someone else, and great about being able to skip the tasks you’d prefer never to do again! Humans evolved to live in groups and cooperate. If you’re not leveraging the power of cooperation, you’re leaving a lot of joy and progress languishing on the table.
I encourage you to actually do this exercise and actually talk to others about what you discovered. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to start thinking in this way and taking small actions to find solutions, and the potential rewards are endless…especially in this age of technology, where it’s easy to connect with others on a variety of platforms almost no matter what you’re looking for. You may decide that it works best to hire someone to do some of your least favorite tasks, or you might find trade- or gift-oriented solutions. However you choose to proceed, I hope you find that you start to feel a greater sense of energy and space in your life through these small, thoughtful actions.